Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big

tags

Lisp

Origin of Worse is Better. See rebuttal

Notes

The key problem with Lisp today stems from the tension between two opposing software philosophies. The two philosophies are called The Right Thing and Worse is Better.

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It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface.

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It is slightly better to be simple than correct.

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it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency.

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Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality.

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Early Unix and C are examples of the use of this school of design

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worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the- right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.

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A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again.

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programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop.

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it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken

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Half the computers that exist at any point are worse than median (smaller or slower). Unix and C work fine on them.

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the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing.

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